Man and Wife eBook

“What! you can’t even speak to such a
perfectly pliable person as Lady Lundie? You
may have been a very useful fellow at sea. A more
helpless young man I never met with on shore.
Get out with you into the garden among the other sparrows!
Somebody must confront her ladyship. And if you
won’t—­I must.”

He pushed Arnold out of the library, and applied meditatively
to the knob of his cane. His gayety disappeared,
now that he was alone. His experience of Lady
Lundie’s character told him that, in attempting
to win her approval to any scheme for hurrying Blanche’s
marriage, he was undertaking no easy task. “I
suppose,” mused Sir Patrick, thinking of his
late brother—­“I suppose poor Tom had
some way of managing her. How did he do it, I
wonder? If she had been the wife of a bricklayer,
she is the sort of woman who would have been kept
in perfect order by a vigorous and regular application
of her husband’s fist. But Tom wasn’t
a bricklayer. I wonder how Tom did it?”
After a little hard thinking on this point Sir Patrick
gave up the problem as beyond human solution.
“It must be done,” he concluded.
“And my own mother-wit must help me to do it.”

In that resigned frame of mind he knocked at the door
of Lady Lundie’s boudoir.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH.

OUTWITTED.

SIR PATRICK found his sister-in-law immersed in domestic
business. Her ladyship’s correspondence
and visiting list, her ladyship’s household
bills and ledgers; her ladyship’s Diary and Memorandum-book
(bound in scarlet morocco); her ladyship’s desk,
envelope-case, match-box, and taper candlestick (all
in ebony and silver); her ladyship herself, presiding
over her responsibilities, and wielding her materials,
equal to any calls of emergency, beautifully dressed
in correct morning costume, blessed with perfect health
both of the secretions and the principles; absolutely
void of vice, and formidably full of virtue, presented,
to every properly-constituted mind, the most imposing
spectacle known to humanity—­the British
Matron on her throne, asking the world in general,
When will you produce the like of Me?